


Gifting Chaos

by Firebird_Falling



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Crack, Gen, Loki Redemption (sort of), Pranks and Practical Jokes, Steve is so done, Team as Family, Tony Stark is probably a bit crazy, Troublemaker Clint Barton, no kittens were harmed in the making of this fic, redemption by confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 10:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17958650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firebird_Falling/pseuds/Firebird_Falling
Summary: After a few too many hours without sleep, Tony comes up with a new way to deal with the Loki Problem. Cue the Avengers attempting to be more chaotic than the God of Chaos. Steve really wasn't prepared for this sort of experience when he woke up in the future.T for swearing





	Gifting Chaos

 

\--

 

"I've been thinking." Tony announced, as he stepped into the common room of the floor.

There was a shattering of ceramic as Clint swept his mug of coffee off the table in his rush to dive behind the nearby sofa. In the chair beside the one he'd vacated, Natasha rolled her eyes. Steve looked up at the ceiling as if it would give him answers to the insanity that was their team.

"Rude, birdbrain, rude," Tony said, and then continued on as though it hadn't happened. "What if we just did weird things back? Threw some curveballs ourselves for a change."

"What?" Steve asked, perplexed. He was also seated at the table in the kitchen area, an apron still wrapped around his waist, even though he had cleared off the stove a while ago. It was a pink one with frills and bows on it that a Fox News reporter had suggested was a more appropriate outfit for Natasha than her carbon nanofiber and titanium reinforced, one of a kind wearable armory that masqueraded as a combat suit. Steve had taken offence. His instagram followers had heartily approved.

"I'm not saying we ignore the fight or anything, but like, what if we gave him a stuffed animal or a pie or hell, even just used a glitter bomb?"

Natasha, not even looking up from her breakfast, seemed to feel the pleading gaze of the Captain, and decided to put him out of his misery. "Tony, if you want our opinion, you need to tell us what you're talking about or where this conversation started."

The engineer cocked his head to the side a bit, eyes narrowed. "We were debriefing. You made me go to a debriefing. We're supposed to come up with ways to neutralize Loki. This was your idea, the both of you," he said, gaze flicking over to Steve.

"That was two days ago Tony," Steve said, concerned. "Have you slept since then?" he asked, though, given the untended facial hair and shirt on which the grease stains had multiple levels of overlapping grease stains, it was pretty clear that he hadn't.

Waving off the concern, the shorter man finally left his side of the room, bee-lining for the coffee maker. "Well that explains why I'm out of coffee," he muttered.

From the other side of the couch, there was a shuffling noise, as Clint moved to stay out of sight. Tony spared the furnishing a withering glare. "I can hear you, asshole. Aren't you supposed to be good at his covert stuff?"

"Go back to your coffee and leave me in peace," came the couch's retort.

"No, you should be going to bed, not drinking more of that," Steve said, even as the remainder of the pot he'd made for breakfast was relocated to Stark's newly acquired mug.

"If you're trying to separate me from my coffee, you'll have to do it by prying it from my cold dead hands," was the unruffled reply. "But seriously, what if we just did random shit in the middle of the fight? Loki's the God of Chaos, he does it all the time. What do you think he'd do if we did it back?"

"Be chaotic to the God of Chaos? Dunno," Steve sighed and shrugged. "Do you think he'd think we were up to something?"

"Probably, but would it matter?"

"It would if it made him more dangerous," Steve replied, brow furrowing.

Tony gave the soldier a dead stare over the rim of his mug. "More dangerous than the maniac who lit a building on fire and threw a small bus at you yesterday?"

"Two days ago," Natasha corrected, idly filling in a line of squares in her crossword puzzle. "It was two days ago, because you've been awake for fifty-seven hours now."

"Not relevant," Tony said, flapping a hand in her direction. "I don't think it could make anything worse, is what I'm saying."

"Aaaand now you've jinxed it," the woman sighed. She stood up, folding the newspaper up as Tony gave it an offended look. He'd made his opinion of paper in his tower perfectly clear, but obviously some people didn't respect their landlord.

"I agree," Steve chimed in. "You've said those words too many times, and there's always a way it gets worse. Go to bed, Tony. We can discuss it again when you're more coherent."

Offended, the engineer replied with "I'm always coherent. I could go another two days awake and still revolutionize an industry or two."

"Your third suggestion was to throw a glitter bomb at Loki. There's no way in hell you're coherent. Go to sleep, Stark," the assassin said before exiting the room. Somehow neither the newspaper nor the pen she had been using were visible on her person anymore. Idly, Tony wondered if she'd want a weaponized pen. Then she'd have a reason to need paper in her life.

Undaunted, Tony turned back to Steve. "Okay, so maybe a glitter bomb isn't a great idea, but seriously, what if we just threw a watermelon on him or something?"

"A watermelon."

"Or maybe some rhubarb," Tony said. "That's more random, right? And it won't stain his outfit, which I’m sure would lead to actual murder."

"Natasha's right, you're not coherent," Steve said, getting up. His pink, frilly apron momentarily distracted Tony from the Captain's objective, so there was little he could do when the super soldier took a firm grip of his arm and began marching him to the elevator. "Jarvis, would you mind saving and shutting down all his projects? Mister Stark is going to bed now."

"Gladly, Captain" Jarvis answered from the elevator speakers, as the doors pealed open for the pair.

"Traitor! Jarvis, how could you?"

Steve tuned out the complaints all the way to Tony's opulent master suite. Hopefully the man would wake up and come up with better ideas for dealing with their most persistent villain.

 

\--

 

Sadly, Steve's hopes were in vain. Not because Tony insisted on talking it over when he woke up again, no. By the time Steve realized that the topic hadn't been discarded, it was already too late to do anything more than damage control.

The issue was, given that Loki did a very good impression of the embodiment of chaos, one couldn't really rely on him having a regular schedule. Sometimes he would attack, and then disappear for three or four months and reappear in Sri Lanka. Sometimes he'd attack twice in a four hour period only for SHIELD to realize that he'd actually used them both as a diversion for having stolen something worrisome during in the half hour prior to the fights. Sometimes he'd get bored and skip out in the middle of an attack only to show up twenty minutes later on somebody's twitter feed, eating fried octopus in Seoul.

So four days after the aborted discussion about not throwing rhubarb at a demigod, said demigod decided to make an appearance in lower Manhattan, with eleven zebras, and four undead horses straight out of Steve's catholic schoolboy nightmares.

The Avengers were summoned, and they formed up with the usual battle plan, all according to Steve's instruction, and then, predictably, everything went straight to hell. One moment two of the horses were charging down the street, melting asphalt with every step, and spreading rot with every breath, and the next moment Tony was swooping out from between some nearby buildings, pelting rubber ducks at Loki (and the rest of the animals that surrounded him) like his life depended on it.

Half a dozen ducks met a gooey end on the liquid sidewalk, but four somehow survived their flights to make contact with the nearby (somehow fireproof) zebras.

Turns out that zebras don't like yellow plastic blobs being flung at them. They bolted, en masse. The herd instinct must have kicked in because one of the remaining nightmare horses went with them.

Theoretically, that was the kind of moment in which Tony would also depart, to herd the creatures back to somewhere less public and corral them. Instead, the maniac yelled "Birdbrain, track those furry shits for me would you, I'll catch up in a moment," before heading off Thor on his typical quest to physically apprehend his brother.

In the background, Steve probably noted that Natasha seemed to have found a way to mount one of the original pair of horses, lasso the other and direct them both generally towards the rest of the equine bunch, but Steve's brain had finally caught up to the fact that Tony had managed to smuggle at least two dozen rubber ducks to the fight and was using them as advanced weaponry. Mostly, this registered in his head because Tony, with a suspicious looking cardboard Amazon box, was hovering in plain sight of a somewhat confused looking God of Mischief (or whatever his official title was) and was excitedly explaining that the online retailer had recently added rubber ducks wearing Loki's signature helmet to its vast array of commodities.

Loki, who was seated on the last remaining death horse, wasn't even trying to fight him.

(Somewhere in on comms, Thor was panicked-ly asking Bruce if it was finally time to go Green, or Pikachu, or something, anything, "what is this madness, good friend, is he enthralled?")

Steve, the handful of civilians he'd been escorting to safety, Bruce and Thor in the quinjet, and one bold news-helicopter all watched, aghast, as Tony managed to get within arm's length of a non-violent Loki. He pulled out half a dozen other rubber ducks; apparently all the Avengers had plastic poultry versions of themselves as well- before pressing the entire box of ducks into Loki's hands and amiably flying off to find Clint and the zebras.

The god looked at the box of yellow bath toys, utterly bewildered. There were a good dozen Loki-ducks right on top. He picked one up, gave it a squeeze, and nearly seemed to jump out of his skin when it squeaked.

And without further ado, he vanished.

The horses vanished with him. The ducks, the zebras and the melted streets remained.

 

Eventually, when the zebras had been safely ushered to the nearest zoo and a truly badass montage of footage of Natasha's cross-city ride on the back of a half skeletal horse had gone viral, everyone made it to the designated SHIELD debriefing room in the lower levels of the tower.

It was probably the least rational debriefing Steve had ever been a part of. And that was saying something, given how much they'd been through in the previous year and a half.

Half an hour in, Steve sat there with his head in his hands and a prayer for sanity in his thoughts. He'd already given up trying to maintain peace. Clint, Fury, Hill and Tony were having a shouting match that threatened to give him a migraine regardless of the serum.

Steven's first assumption was that Clint would stay largely out of the conversation, but he'd apparently forgotten that the resident archer had a rather large mischievous streak himself. Despite the hiding he'd done during the initial conversation, he'd sought Stark out at some point and the two had been plotting together ever since. And now, with Fury and Hill dead set against 'potentially antagonizing an unstable egoist with bullshit magic powers' (Fury's words, not Hill's) he had a stake in keeping the game alive.

They had already made a list of possible distractions for their least favorite god.

Steve had never been more acutely aware that, as a ninety-mumble-mumble year old, he was most certainly entitled to retire. He really should have retired already anyway. The business with the monster land-walking jellyfish attempting to take over Puerto Rico should have been his wakeup call. (Not because of the jellyfish, but because of the sheer bureaucracy and the animal rights activists that ended up wanting to let them start a colony. For Christ's sake, they weren't an actual species, they weren't sentient, they were freakish projects of a marine biologist with a complex and a tendency towards puppetry. Also, PETA was officially on Steve's shit list.)

So yeah. Steve had given up, and, having spent a year living in close proximity to Tony Stark, he knew that if the argument continued, there was actually no way that Fury would win. Tony had an idea and-

"You can't actually stop me, anyway! I'm a consultant, and a private citizen!"

-that. It was bound to come up when the engineer wanted to make Fury go away.

Shortly thereafter, Hill and Fury left the tower. Steve had done his best to smooth things over, but everyone involved knew that they were meaningless platitudes. If he had had any chance of changing his friend's mind about the campaign of insanity he and Clint were planning, those chances had vanished the moment Fury had tried to make demands. Nothing made Tony Stark stick to his guns like spite.

 

\--

 

Because Steve was occasionally smiled upon by his good old fashioned monotheistic God, Loki didn't actually re-appear for another two and a half months. Thor brought word that he'd been sighted in Vanaheim at a couple of less reputable markets, and on a planet called Xandar, poking through their capital city library.

This had led to a very long discussion about what the difference between a planet and a realm was, and why some places and planets were included in the Nine Realms, and _how many other places were there according to Asgard's knowledge of the galaxy?_

They were all, reasonably, cautious about going into a fight with Loki after he'd been away and stocking up on supplies for so long. And Steve was particularly wary because no amount of badgering with Clint, Tony or Jarvis had yielded the contents of their prank list. Natasha was probably aware of it, however. Since she hadn't brought anything to him, it was probably not entirely insane. He hoped.

But just in case, Steve split everyone up into pairs and made sure that the two troublemakers were in positions that were easy to cover, in case one or both of them went rogue on their mad little scheme. It wasn't like they wouldn't do it without his help or permission anyway, so it was best to simply prepare to give them maneuverability.

But for some reason, neither of them did anything during the fight. The five Avengers (Thor being away at Asgard for royal business) chased Loki through the increasingly dense evergreen forest that had grown in the middle of downtown Buffalo. Tony fired perfectly normal repulsor blasts, and Clint fired perfectly normal exploding arrows, and there wasn't a speck of glitter anywhere.

Steve wasn't the only one who seemed to be anticipating something weird throughout the fight. Loki seemed particularly attuned to Ironman's position at all times, and though he left a few openings for something bizarre to be dropped in his lap, nothing ever did. When Clint landed a particularly well placed acid arrow and caused a cascade of tumbling trees, Loki vanished and the Avengers went home.

 

The next fight with Loki, only three days after the tree incident, was equally tense. Although that might have been because it was a more dangerous sort of attack than just an inconvenient and spooky forest. Loki gave some semblance of sentience to a bunch of fireplaces in a half a dozen DC restaurant kitchens. The fireplaces then grew in size, consumed the restaurants that they had previously occupied, grew some freakishly knobby chicken legs and began walking down the streets, setting fire to and then consuming other small businesses. There were a lot of people sent to nearby hospitals with burns, and some environmental group was going to be less than thrilled with six house-sized fireplaces being unceremoniously airdropped into the Potomac river, but no one was killed.

As for Loki himself, he had vanished after a casually-not-casual comment from Tony about it being really hard to bring gifts with him when he had to fly over multiple state lines to get to Loki.

Steve nearly shook the man. Hill actually tried to slap him upside the head. (Tough the suit made it a symbolic gesture instead of a painful one.)

The only question that remained after the debrief was whether Loki would take it as an invitation to reign his fights in towards New York, or a subtle threat to keep making them fly half way around the globe to get to him.

Steve should have known what the answer to that question would be. Obviously, as with Tony Stark, Loki lived on spite and laughing in the face of danger. So the immortal pain-in-the-ass showed up in New York City the next day, with two large, magical boulders that he set in the middle of Central Park.

While everyone was trying to figure out what the magic was doing, Loki skipped parts unknown.

Just as Steve was told that the magic on the rocks appeared to be both excessive and benign (read: a completely pointless distraction) the good Captain realized that Tony had been far too quiet for far too long. Also, Clint was doing an awful job of trying to drive the comms conversation to bizarre conspiracy theory arguments that were very clearly distractions.

"Hawkeye, where's Ironman?" Steve said, interrupting what had to have been a riveting theory on how radio broadcasts might have magical subliminal messaging, and that the government had been doing research in that field after they found a setup that might have done something similar in Latveria last year.

"Ironman, Captain?" the archer said, feigning ignorance very, very poorly. "Shouldn't he be around here somewhere? Oi Rustbucket where are you?"

Steve sighed. "Cut the shit, Hawkeye. Loki's MIA, Ironman's off comms and you're his accomplice. Tell me what you know. He's had enough of a head start already hasn't he?"

There was silence on the other end of the line, and Steve had a sneaking suspicion that the other man was getting an update from their missing team member. He waited patiently for the line to fizzle back to life.

"Well, according to some SHIELD peeps I just happened to overhear, there's a break-in at the Met… and the police might have mentioned Loki's name, so if I were a betting man, and I'm sort of a betting man, I'd be willing to place my bets that you might find Ironman headed in that direction. You know. Since he has Jarvis and Jarvis is probably listening to police radios and all that. And maybe to SHIELD. Though I definitely don't know that for certain."

"Your plausible deniability is noted." Steve replied, as dryly as he could manage. "I don't suppose you're on your way over there now, and would happen to still be in the quinjet and able to give me a ride?"

"I'll be at your location in a bit?" Clint offered, weakly. "I was… taking a detour and I'm almost there now?"

Sighing could probably be classified as one of Steve's hobbies by this point in his life, but at least Clint wasn't actually lying about being almost there. Natasha and Bruce got to Steve's location in time for Clint to grab all three of them. They collectively landed in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art just in time to see Tony, hovering above the steps in full armor, present a dapper suited Loki with full size cardboard cutout of Doctor Doom.

"-like something interesting to do in your lair, you know, when you're not planning whatever ridiculous plot you're working on next." Tony was saying. "Personally, I use them for target practice. I've got a couple of a few politicians that I'm none too fond of myself. Not to name names or anything. Cons: They don't stand up to repulsors and whatnot, but good old fashioned darts are surprisingly therapeutic, and also, they make great gifts and fit in living rooms better than a gun range. Pros: you can Photoshop whatever bullshit you want onto a piece of cardboard and it's hilarious. I seriously considered putting a tutu on Doom here, just for shits and giggles, but I figure you've got illusions to cover it. Also, cardboard is pretty easy to replace if you have a need to burn someone's visage. So yeah. That's a plus too."

Loki gingerly reached out and took the cardboard picture from where Stark had been holding it out to him for the duration of his rambling. For once in his life, he didn't seem to know how to counter the verbal flood of Tony, a feat for which he could usually be counted on.

"I," he started, struggling with something that almost looked like disgustedly pleased bewilderment, before the demigod corrected himself. "It's horrific, Man of Iron. It will go most excellently in my 'lair' as you say. I thank thee."

"Aww shucks Lolo, it's no problem. I wanted to get you a full set, like the ducks, but then figured that SHIELD would yell at me for encouraging you to throw darts at America's Heroes. But if you want a full array of SHIELD's Most Wanted or any of the Fantastic Four, just let me know, I've got you covered."

Loki's brow did a bizarre spasm at the term of endearment, but strangely, with his hand preoccupied with Doom's cutout, Tony escaped being stabbed.

Steve, who should have seen this whole mess coming, took a fortifying breath and stepped forward to interrupt the pair. Unfortunately, the move caught the attention of three people, most notably, Clint.

"Cap, here," the archer said, shoving a small plastic package of professional looking green and black darts into his hands. "Could you give those to him? I'm not going near that bastard. Thanks," he said, and then promptly shoved Steve towards Stark and the demigod, who were watching with glee and apprehension respectively.

The long suffering Captain tried not to look too overrun as Tony made a 'gimme' motion with his hands and Loki allowed him to slowly approach.

The sorcerer took the darts from his hands as though he were being handed a bomb. Or perhaps a baby with a dirty diaper.

"Oh, nice! Clint got you a good set. I made him pick them out 'cause he's the one who knows the most about pointy airborne objects. He saw the set I ordered originally and made me melt them down into slag. Apparently he has Standards," Tony said, making air quotes. "I'll believe _that_ when he stops mixing multiple cuisines worth of leftovers into one bowl and calling it gumbo."

Steve didn't manage to stop himself from sharing a commiserating look with Loki. The god looked about as overwhelmed as Steve did when Tony had been on a two day science binge.

"I don't suppose I can convince you to give back whatever it is you stole from the museum," Steve asked while the manic engineer continued to ramble on beside him.

Loki narrowed his eyes and vanished.

 

\--

 

With three confirmed interactions with Loki within four days, Asgard consented to send Thor back. And probably because of his presence, Loki started doing his dirty work on the other side of the globe, so as to give himself plenty of time to vanish before the quinjet could get there. After three robberies, two counts of arson, one invasion of magically enlarged geese and a day during which anyone who ate strawberries in Tokyo found themselves snorting soap bubbles out of their noses, Loki finally dared to come back to North America.

Thor, who most certainly did not understand what Tony and Clint were attempting to do, was less than enthusiastic when Steve tried to brief him on the pair's hare-brained scheme.

"You say that he will not attack them, however I find this most unlikely," the Thunderer rumbled.

"I know, and I also think it's very strange, but he hasn't attacked them yet. They might not do anything this time, since he's in Canada, but if they do, please watch first, and don't interfere unless he makes a deliberate attack."

"But why would he not attack them, is that not the point of provoking us with his mischief?"

"I don't honestly know, but what they're doing is causing fewer people to die because the fights are shorter."

Thor ran a massive hand across his beard. "I don't like it," he said, but that seemed to be a concession.

"Me neither, Thor. Me neither."

 

It turned out that Clint and Tony did have a plan to celebrate Loki's return to nearby territories. The plan involved an overpowered T-shirt cannon.

After his initial bewilderment passed, Loki began laughing hysterically. Steve, with his enhanced vision, didn't even bother hiding his dismay at the reason why. His face met his palm. "Why do I associate with these people," he muttered to himself. He wasn't quiet enough, however. Thor was at his side in a moment.

"What is it, what is wrong? Is it time to intervene?"

"No. They just have terrible taste in shirts. Loki thinks its funny enough, I guess."

Indeed, all of this shirts were either Avengers themed, or Loki themed. Loki was holding half a dozen shirts in his own colors, while Clint attempted to shoot him with cloth bundles alternating between his own purple, Ironman red, Hulk green, and Loki's green and black. Amazingly, their adversary actually let a few of the balled up shirts hit him, having decided that they weren't playing a trick on him and about to swap real projectiles in for the fabric ones the moment his back was turned. Steve cocked his head to the side at the revelation. "Huh."

After about fifteen minutes of picking through all the best shirts, some heated discussion on the merits of each individual's merchandise, Tony somehow managed to talk Loki into putting on a shirt in his own red and gold. The demigod posed for a split second, nearly smiling, and then suddenly caught sight of Thor. He must have been unaware of the thunder god's proximity because his face contorted briefly and he vanished.

"Aww man," Clint whined into the comms.

"Come on, let's get back to the jet and do a damage report," Steve sighed. He turned to Thor and did a double take. The Asgardian was sporting an emerald green shirt that read 'Always be yourself, unless you can be Loki, then always be Loki.' He looked down at himself. His own uniform was covered with a T-shirt reading 'Low-key Loki' with a picture of a lounging cartoon Loki.

Thor muttered something that Steve didn't catch (in Asgardian, Aesir, Norwegian? He wasn't sure) and tried to rip the shirt off of himself. It didn't budge.

By the time Tony got back, porting his 'Lokilicious' T-shirt, Steve and Thor had determined that the shirts were resistant to fire, lightning, tearing, cutting and being removed. "Perfect for the shop!" Stark declared, after proving that they were also resistant to staining. "I'll have to thank him next time we fight."

 

\--

 

"Whatever happened to throwing rhubarb at him?" Steve asked one night, in the middle of the utterly incomprehensible movie that Clint had insisted they watch. The archer made an irritated shushing noise at him, but Stark, ever a talker during movie night, happily ignored his teammate.

"We decided against random mayhem and went with pointed mayhem. Rhubarb might be fun for us, but Nat thought that it might make him escalate his own randomness. Pointed mayhem, on the other hand, wouldn't. Or if it did, he'd have to be pointed back, and we can channel that into something less destructive, by being sort of friendly ourselves.

On the screen a depiction of Santa Claus was gearing up to fight some aliens in a final battle for Mars. Steve decided that trying to keep his sanity was a lost cause. Natasha was on the planning committee, so there was no stopping it now.

The spy in question, ever able to anticipate his thoughts, patted his knee consolingly. "Don't worry, the plan is sound, and I have a couple of backups just in case."

"That isn't actually comforting," he said plaintively.

She smirked. "I know."

 

\--

 

It turned out that the plan that the trio had hatched came to head the next time Loki bothered to appear in New York City.

Ostensibly the villain was there to take something from the Museum of Natural History, but he stopped his plan pretty quickly when the Avengers showed up on the front steps of the building.

"What a lovely welcoming party!" Loki crowed as Thor swung at him, lightning trailing in Mjolnir's wake. "I have some guests who would adore being entertained by you."

A large skeleton of a T-rex burst leapt through the glass filled archway behind the mage, showering everyone in bits of glass. A brontosaurus and a second T-rex followed, knocking out most of the doors and a host of smaller dinosaur skeletons emerged in their wake.

"Who showed him Night at the Museum! What idiot gave him this idea!" Stark yelled over the comms, already making erratic aerial maneuvers to avoid a pack of pterodactyl.

Loki cackled and settled into watch the sport and reassemble his minions when they became too busted up to fight. It was clearly a futile fight, they all saw it after only a few minutes. The dinosaurs were big and numerous, but not particularly difficult to break. The problem was that it didn’t seem particularly difficult for their magic wielding enemy to simply reassemble them time after time. And any time they tried to attack Loki instead of the skeletons, the dinosaurs would obligingly wander off to terrorize civilians or break nearby buildings."I’m going for plan K!" Tony said suddenly, five minutes into the mess. He sped off towards the tower, leaving Thor to handle the aerial problems without bothering to wait for confirmation, or even acknowledgement.

"Ironman, what's plan K?" Steve found himself yelling over the comms.

"No time to explain-" Clint said, suddenly sprinting for the quinjet. "Can you four hold the fort for a few minutes, I need to get the supplies."

Steve was about to protest, but Black Widow beat him to the punch. "Make it fast Hawkeye," she said, as she shattered the jaw of an oncoming dinosaur.

It was then that Steve realized that it was another mayhem plan that they had concocted. He gritted his teeth and broke the back of the brontosaurus with his shield for the second time.

Though Loki seemed equally confused by the sudden disappearance of a third of the team, he made the mistake of stalling, and Thor took advantage of the delay to engage his wayward brother directly, throwing him back into the stone of the Museum's walls.

Steve and Natasha had an easier time corralling the dinosaurs when Loki was diverting his attention to deal with their hammer throwing bulldozer, and the Hulk was doing an admirable job of rending the larger skeletons into small enough pieces that Loki's reanimation wasn’t so instantaneous. Collectively, they managed to keep everything contained for the five minutes it took Tony to come flying back, slower than he had left, and with a small box hugged tightly to his metal chest.

"Thor! Back off for a second!" Stark yelled through the external speakers. Thor had a tendency not to listen to his ear piece if he was in the middle of a heated battle, so raised voices were the better option.

The blonde god hurled Loki across the street one last time before Ironman physically got between the pair of them and repeated his request. "Thanks L'Oreal, but take a break for a moment, I've got something here."

"What is the meaning of this, I-"

"Thor, we talked about this, give him a moment," Steve said, praying that the other man would listen for a moment.

Miraculously, he did. "I will go deal with the skeleton beasts," he grumbled before flying off.

Behind Ironman, Loki got to his feet, and brushed some of the dirt and dust off of his armor. "You think it wise to stop him now? Fools, you-"

Tony glided his way over, opened the box and deposited a small fluffy kitten in Loki's arms.

Loki looked down at the fragile little creature and blinked.

"If you really wanted to explore the natural history of earth, then I'm obligated to get you a cat." Ironman stated, closing the box and hooking it to his back, somehow. "Cat's have a great biological history, and a lot of importance in various Earth cultures, so those are great places to start your research. Dinosaurs are cool and all, but they're much harder to pet."

Loki ran a single finger over the forehead of the kitten, and it reached up to bat at his hand with tiny claws.

"I don't actually know if you're allergic or not," the insane human said. "We tried asking Thor a couple of weeks back, but then we had to actually explain what allergies were and by the time we were done, we were discussing dwarven sand worms, or something. So I never really got an answer. But that's not really the point. You really seem like a cat person, and every good villain needs a snooty feline mascot, so it's all about learning Earth history and promoting your image, really. Also, I may have been bullied into buying up a kill shelter to save a few cats and now I'm sort of morally obligated to help them find homes. She's had all her shots, and stuff, so she should be fine for whatever lair you keep. Unless you have, like, space rabies or something. I don't think we have a vaccine against space rabies-"

Loki, like Steve, seemed to once again be at a loss for how to combat the sheer verbal output of Tony Stark. Also, he didn't seem to know what to do with the frankly adorable grey tiger-striped kitten in his hands.

"If you don't like gray cats, there are others in the litter that I could get. There was a black one, but I thought it was a bit too cliché. Also, this one tried to bite me. I thought you'd appreciate a little bitey monster more than a normal one, but again, there are options if that's not your cup of tea-"

Loki unconsciously hugged the kitten closer to his chest, and that single moment was when Steve knew that this plan (whatever Tony's end goals actually were) was going to work.

 

Steve let Loki and Tony argue over the increasingly elaborate ways that the kitten could be misused as a weapon -both against and by- Loki. Meanwhile, he went to ambush Clint.

The archer had landed the quinjet only a couple of minutes after Tony arrived, and hurried out to get a status report.

"Dinos aren't regenerating anymore, and between Thor and Hulk, they're almost down to the last of the little ones. Widow's getting a final count so we don't lose any. I don't suppose you picked up cat litter and kitten food on your supplies run?"

Clint grinned. "It's on the 'jet," he said, jerking his head in the quinjets direction and they trudged over to their ride.

Once on the jet and in relative privacy, Steve pounced. "I know you and Tony have Natasha reviewing your plans, but this secrecy thing needs to stop. Today could have ended very badly, with the two of you disappearing suddenly, for an unknown time, and for an unknown reason," he said, putting as much unwavering authority into his voice as possible.

The shorter man scratched at the back of his head. "Yeah, I kinda assumed it'd end sooner rather than later," he mumbled.

Steve handed him two large bags of cat litter that he threw over his shoulder. "Clint, I’m not mad about the kitten, and I’m not even mad about the gift giving…thing you three have going. I’m annoyed that you thought you had to hide things like this from me. From the rest of us." God, he was starting to sound just like his Ma. "It was an interesting idea, and it looks like it worked, I just want to be informed."

Getting a gloomy nod of acceptance, the pair departed the quinjet and sidled up to the green and red duo and dropped three very large reusable tote bags of supplies in front of Loki.

"Well Loki, it looks like these hoodlums aren't leaving you entirely wrong-footed with your new pet."

Warily, the god took peered into one of the bags. He poked at the supplies with the blunt end of the spear he had been carrying. He seemed satisfied.

The Captain was in the middle of trying to think of a semi diplomatic way of asking if Loki had managed to steal anything and if they could get it back, when Clint butted in with a "so what're you gonna name her?"

"I am uncertain, I hadn't considered it yet," Loki answered, looking at the tiny fluffball.

"She looks like a Lily to me," Clint said from a couple steps behind Steve. He was still very wary of getting within weapon's reach of the demigod, clearly. "Cause she's a tiger-stripe but you can't just call her tiger. Tiger lilies are thing though, and they're pretty nice."

"That's the dumbest name I've ever heard," came the rebuttal from Tony. "She's fierce and vicious and the proud cat of a supervillain. You can't name her after a flower! Call her Killer or something."

"You were been banned from naming anything after you named the toaster CRISP-E and made it hate me. You have no say, jackass."

"I didn't make it hate you, you tortured it, and it retaliated. It's your fault. And my naming skills are amazing."

"You only know how to make terrible acronyms. What's Killer going to stand for then?"

"Uhhh. Keeping Intergalactic Lunat…Loners Largely Retired?"

"You dropped an E there."

"I always drop a letter. It's tradition."

"It's not tradition, it's terrible."

"I think I shall call her Asmund," Loki interrupted, rolling his eyes almost as hard as Steve wanted to roll his own.

"A fine name for a fine familiar, Brother!" Thor said, dropping out of the sky suddenly. It seems that the dinosaurs were no longer around to distract him. "Now hand over what you have stolen and we may yet be lenient upon you and your new charge!"

Steve's palm hit the forehead of his mask even before Loki teleported out, taking the Asmund and her supplies with him.

"Tact, Thor. You need to remember to have tact."

 

\--

 

It became a trend, after that. Loki would appear, create some disturbance, probably set a few things on fire, and wait for the Avengers to show up. Tony would get there first, shoot at him a couple of times to make the magical-whatever-it-was-that-day stop doing damage while the quinjet was en route. After that, they'd all fight and at some point, one of them would pull out the secret weapon.

Amazon had become a family pastime at the tower, and powered by Tony's credit cards, they worked together to find the most interesting and bizarre things that the internet had to offer. Once, Clint had leapt off of a building in an inflatable velociraptor costume to hand Loki an office door placard that read "It has been ___ days since I last set anything on fire." One was evidently to use chalk to update the days and terrify one's coworkers.

Another time, Tony brought a plate of cheese and crackers to a fight in which Loki was using clones. He sat down on a rooftop and ate them slowly, almost obscenely, until the real Loki showed up to partake. The fight after that, he spoke the entire time in iambic pentameter, doing his best to rhyme and sound even more Shakespearian than the Aesir. In a third fight, he finally got around to throwing rhubarb at Loki's head.

Natasha got in on the game when she took a single paintball pistol with her to a fight and managed to nail the demigod four times in the chest with glittery pink paint that smelled faintly of lilac. It didn't go over very well, until the assassin put two pink spots into the front of Steve's uniform and he performed the most prolonged and dramatic death scene he could manage, with Clint playing the part of overly emotional sidekick.

Bruce declined participation, but was happy to help brainstorm, coming up with a gift basket full of different kinds of tea, bath bombs, a nail care kit, and a plate full of brownies, half of which were dosed with laxatives, and half with pot. Clint, who was the delivery boy for that particular gift, bore the brunt of Loki's ire in their next fight. That is, right up until he complimented Loki's particularly glossy nail polish.

Even Thor eventually came around. For someone who claimed to love his brother most dearly, he seemed to hold the most disbelief that Loki was capable of being (not good, definitely not outright good but…) less malicious. But even the great holder of Mjolnir could be swayed by the fits of honest laughter that the group was managing to pull from the trickster's mouth on a bimonthly basis.

"Long has it been since I have seen my brother in these high spirits," he said one night, while slightly more inebriated than usual. "It reminds me of how he used to be."

In the next fight, Thor managed to pull off the most tentative and harmless prank yet. He threw a confetti bomb at his brother's shoulder and showered him in silver and gold flakes. After a bit of stunned silence, Loki enchanted Thor's hair to shed similar confetti every time it wafted in the wind. Thor nearly cried.

The uniting theme, however, was that after the tension had eased and the prank had been laughed over, someone asked about the kitten.

"Asmund is doing quite fine. She has started eating dry food, and is dutifully rending her scratching post to fiber," Loki would say.

"Asmund has discovered that yowling in the middle of the night is the most certain way to earn attention. The cat is a hellion, Stark."

"Asmund did the most adorable thing last week! Here, I will show you pictures," he'd croon, before whipping out the smartphone that none of them knew he owned, to show a photo gallery made entirely of pictures of the cat.

"You really ought to put those on the internet," Tony said, at one point. "Cats are the internet's second most favorite thing, right after porn. And she's very cute."

And so, Steve resigned himself to explaining Twitter to a demigod in the way that he'd wished someone had explained it to him the previous year. Less technical and more metaphorical. And of course, all of the Avengers immediately followed Loki's Twitter account to get their daily updates on the feline.

Two weeks later, in the middle of their next fight, Loki smacked the Captain over the head with his own shield before yelling "And that's for signing me up for a Twitter account when I clearly needed an Instagram account instead!"

At the end of that fight, they all dutifully followed each other on Instagram. "Yeah, Twitter's pretty good if you want to yell at other idiots on the internet, though," Tony consoled. "Although, I’m sure you'll be yelled at in return. If you haven't already found that out."

"Yes. I made sure the fools regretted their choice of insult most dearly," Loki replied, with an unsettlingly toothy grin.

 

\--

 

Nine months after the Asmund found her forever home, and more than a year after the rubber duck incident, SHIELD produced a formal analysis of the effectiveness of the team's tactics against the mage. It was the kind of ridiculous bureaucracy that large organizations seemed to thrive on, and that all the Avengers categorically disdained on principle. They weren't all that big on law abiding, given their collective histories, and frankly, after living with Jarvis for so long, it seemed a colossal waste of time to delegate anyone to actually write up reports about facts and figures when one really should have been keeping a running tally and analysis the entire time.

But for once, SHIELD paper pushers actually managed to do something not boring, and produced a document that the team pored over with gusto one evening.

In a comparison between the nineteen months pre-ducks and the nine months post cat, Loki's average property damage, per fight, had gone down by eighty one percent, and the number of injuries had fallen by ninety three percent. The number of fires lit, and the number of items stolen remained roughly the same, but that was it. More tellingly, someone actually went and adjusted his murder count to discount the initial alien invasion, and found that he had actually been a lot less murder-y than a lot of his villain cohorts. Most of the people who died in his attacks actually died as a byproduct of the aforementioned property damage. And in the months after Asmund pranced her way into his life, the number of people who died was a sum total of one. A single older woman who had a heart attack from their nearby disturbance.

Which wasn't to say that he wasn't a problem. A kill is a kill, after all. But… well… the Avengers had bigger fish to fry. Loki officially dropped from first place, to eleventh place in SHIELD's villain ranking. The team unanimously agreed to never tell the sorcerer of the results. Instead, they planned a small party for the god as soon as Thor went back to Asgard. Fury had finally deigned to follow Loki's Instagram, after all, and there needed to be cake to mark the occasion.

("That is one motherfuckin' cuteass cat," He'd said, and hit the 'like' icon.)

It was the first time they'd invited Loki over to the tower, and oddly, no one even seemed to notice this until about half way through the night when the demigod had to ask where the spare mugs were kept, and Bruce realized that he'd never actually been in the kitchen before. The whole party was vaguely perturbed by the fact, but got over it well enough.

And so the visits became a regular thing. Natasha made an offhand comment about how she'd never been allowed to pet Asmund before they'd handed her over (a bald-faced lie, given where Asmund had been hidden before the handoff), and suddenly there were bi-monthly movie nights with the cat in attendance. It took a few nights, but eventually Thor managed to reign in his excitement enough that he was no longer banished to his room for the first hour of Loki's visits.

It wasn't long after that that the Avengers started teaming up with Loki whenever there was a particularly imbecilic villain to fight. Loki seemed to take offence when stupid people wanted to claim equal standing as him in the world of supervillains. He wouldn’t help them out with the likes of Doom or Magneto, but The Great Paradox (who was neither great, nor a paradox), Gargantuar (who was actually gargantuan, not much else), Beast Lord (haha, no.), and Mister Nothing (who actually lived up to his name) were all easily punted into obscurity by the snide demigod.

In a fit of brotherly affection, Thor asked Loki if he was going to join their ranks as a hero. It was a question that everyone was thinking, and that everyone but Thor knew better than to ask. ("Tact, Thor. You need to learn tact.")

In retaliation, Loki turned the empire state building a blinding pink and magic-ed the Statue of Liberty so that she seemed to be fighting a gust of wind from blowing her robes up to indecent heights. Really, if there was a way to count the number of egos that Loki wounded per month, Steve figured that the man would quite easily make his way back up to the top of SHIELD's Most Wanted List. Thankfully, that wasn't a measurable statistic.

 

And that was how the Avengers saved the world (or at least a large portion of New York's infrastructure) with a bunch of rubber ducks, some rhubarb, and a cat.

 

\--

 

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to let me know what you think! And if you see any errors, I'll happily fix them if you let me know. I didn't have this beta read, so I'm sure there are some.
> 
> And for anyone who cares, there is actually a movie called "Santa Claus Versus the Martians." Theoretically, I watched it at some point in my life, but I have since forgotten it entirely, for the sake of my sanity. So yeah. Seems like the kind of movie that trolll!Clint would inflict upon people.
> 
> Constructive criticism appreciated!


End file.
